Valve Awards Man $20,000 for Identifying Steam-key Generating Bug

They say that sometimes you pay for your mistakes, well it certainly seems like that’s the case for Valve, as they award a man for finding a bug that produces steam keys but it could have been a lot worse.

Valve Awards Man $20,000 for Identifying Steam-key Generating Bug

Artem Moskowsky was lucky enough to find an obscure bug in the Steam app. This self-identified “bug hunter” stumbled upon a glitch that would generate thousands of free keys for any game on the platform.

While this report dates back to August, it was only recently that Valve let the this news go public. They rewarded Moskowsky $20,000 for his find. While the bug didn’t generate new keys, it did expose already existing ones, allowing anyone with access and know-how to be able to get a hold of these keys.

Luckily following the report Valve didn’t manage to find anyone who had taken advantage of the bug. In a recent article with The Register, Moskowky revealed he was able to gain access to 36,000 keys for Portal 2.

It doesn’t take much to imagine what would happen if someone else with more malicious intent could have done with thousands of keys, probably end up on some second-hand site that sells keys for a living.